


Sincerely (Right Beside You)

by luninosity



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Commitment, Cuddling & Snuggling, Established Relationship, Hot Cocoa, Kind Of Half-AU Actually, M/M, Rain, Selkies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-16
Updated: 2012-11-16
Packaged: 2017-11-18 19:58:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/564701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Birthday fic for garrideb over on LJ, who requested <i>huddling for warmth fic with James as a selkie, but he simply can't handle cold weather without his sealskin, so Michael is forced to cuddle him whenever he's in his human form.</i></p>
<p>Contains brief reference to Michael having contemplated self-harm in the past, but he’s been properly rescued by James by now; also, lots of cuddling and hot cocoa and love and two people being each other's other halves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sincerely (Right Beside You)

**Author's Note:**

> Evidently my friends and my brain conspire to make me write more AU. Title from Weezer’s “My Best Friend”: _hope you believe me/ ’cause I speak sincerely/ and I mean it when I tell you that I need you/ you're my best friend/ and I love you, and I love you/ yes I do…_

“Rain,” James mutters, “is cold.”

“You shouldn’t mind cold water,” Michael points out, and rubs hands over compactly muscled shoulders anyway, “you swim in cold water all the time.”

“Not as a _human_. How do you survive this?”

“Most of us don’t mind quite as much as you do. Cocoa? It should be ready now.”

“Please.” James curls into the warm spot on the sofa, soaking up the last traces of body heat when Michael gets up; there’s already warm milk beckoning, because it knows the routine as well as they do, but he stops for a second on the way back, looking at James.

Eyes like the blue of evening over oceans. Hair that never quite seems to be tame. Skin that resolutely refuses to tan, and freckles or burns, instead. The first time he’d taken James to the beach in human form, he’d had to practically paint all that skin with sunblock, repeated applications, hands smoothing lotion over all the freckles. James hadn’t appeared to mind.

Sometimes he can’t believe he’s this lucky. That, out of everyone in the world, James fell out of the ocean and landed, very literally, at his, Michael’s, feet.

James looks up. Grins, from under all the blankets in the house. “What’re you thinking about? Also, thank you.”

“Of course. And…the day we met, actually. I think I like thunderstorms, you know.”

“I never did,” James says, between satisfiedly cocoa-related expressions of pleasure, “but I might be starting to. Now.”

“Because you can get me to make you chocolate-flavored beverages when I know you’re cold?”

“Because you want to make me chocolate-flavored beverages when you know I’m cold. Because you let me warm up my feet on your legs—”

“I do? Oh…all right, I do.”

“—and because if there hadn’t been a storm, and I hadn’t been horribly lost, we wouldn’t’ve met. So, yes, I could like the thunderstorms.”

Michael kisses him, for that. Sugar and spice and the indefinable elemental tang of the sea, on his lips: that’s his James, always will be, and that’s perfect.

He wouldn’t’ve believed the story, that first time, if he hadn’t seen the transformation with his own eyes: sleek seal-skin rippling and twisting and falling away, revealing dark hair and pale skin and the bluest eyes he’d ever seen, eyes containing sea-waves and sunlight, and an astonishing voice, rich and complex as honeyed whiskey, saying, incongruously, “I’m sorry, it’s the rain, it hits the water and everything gets turned around and I’ve got a terrible sense of direction anyway and I think I might be lost, sorry, did I startle you, I’m so sorry, do you want to sit down?”

Out of sheer shock, he had.

The eyes’d gazed at him, sudden realization, through the rain; and then James’d walked over, unselfconsciously naked and beautiful, and sat down next to him, and put an arm around him, and Michael hadn’t thrown himself into the murky water after all, hadn’t let all the memories and the despair come up to drown him; had put his head on that offered shoulder and breathed, while the thunder grumbled patiently above.

James _had_ saved his life, then. And rescues him all over again, every single day, with every smile.

He’s tried, in all the ways he can think of, awkward and clumsy and shy and amazed, to say _thank you_ , to say _I love you so damn much_ , every single day, as well.

James _is_ cold, at the moment, because despite his laughing quicksilver speed in ocean depths he’s slow to get acclimated, on land, and sometimes Michael wonders if it’s an actual problem, something for which he should drag James off to the nearest hospital, poor blood circulation or a fragile immune system or even worse possibilities, and James always laughs and rolls his eyes and informs Michael that it’s normal, he’s been sensitive to cold in this form ever since he can remember, and therefore Michael needs to stop worrying and start kissing him instead, because body heat ought to be shared.

He puts his arms around James, in the wake of that thought. James takes another sip of cocoa, closes his eyes ecstatically—no chocolate under the sea—and then opens them, serious now behind the sapphire sparkle. “You said you were thinking about the day we met. What…”

“Only that I was so damn lucky. That you found me. That you—I love you, you know.” So much. Forever. In any shape, in any world, in any weather.

“Oh,” James says, and smiles up at him, “I know. I love you, too.”

“We’ll find them, too,” Michael promises, voice a little muffled, because his lips are pressed into James’s hair. “The rest of your family. We will.” He will. They will. He can do that, for James; can chase fairytales and reports of sea-creatures all over the world, wherever James’s family might’ve been blown by that life-changing tempest, that winter-dark evening, separated and solitary and confused. The search might take years. It already has.

“Scotland,” James says.

“Scotland,” Michael agrees. Anywhere. James is his anchor, his compass, his sense of direction, and if the whale gossip chain has suggested to James that they try Scotland, then Michael will learn to navigate Highland roads and eat haggis.

“Michael,” James says, this time.

“More cocoa?”

“Yes, actually, but not in fact what I was going to say. You know I do love you. Here, or in Scotland, or anyplace.”

“I know.” He does. Still can’t quite believe it, occasionally, but he does know. Outside, the rain plays happy drumbeats on the roof. The fire, indoors, crackles back.

“Even if we find them,” James says, and Michael says, “When,” and James smiles. “Even when we find them…you should know I’m not going to leave you. Not for them, not for anything, not ever.”

The sea-folk don’t settle down. Not really. James’d told him that once, secure in Michael’s arms, lying contentedly in the puddle of sheets and stickiness and afterglow; had told him because Michael’d asked, after an encounter with a well-meaning but unhelpful naiad who’d eyed their entwined fingers curiously. The sea-folk laugh, and play, and mate for fun, and migrate north or south with the passing of time and tides, casual and careless of the surface world.

James has always stayed with him.

Michael’s never asked him to. He’d promised himself, in the wake of that conversation, that he never would. James is magical and beautiful and wild and comes from a world that’s more fantastic and strange than he could ever imagine. If James ever needs to go, feels those tides tugging at his blood, Michael will pull his own heart out of his chest and try to smile with the emptiness inside, because he won’t ask James to stay if that’s something James can’t do.

James has just promised, out loud, to stay.

James puts a hand on Michael’s face, fingertips warmed from the cocoa mug, shorter and broader than Michael’s own and lightly freckled, dustings of color like scattered treasure reclaimed from the sea. “You did hear me, right?”

“I…”

“I mean that. All of it. Come on, you should already know that, you’ve had to put up with me for years, what makes you think I’d want to leave now? Who else would make me hot cocoa, every time it rains?”

“James,” Michael says, helplessly, caught between tears and sudden laughter and the gently determined affection in blue eyes. “Yes.”

“That wasn’t a yes or no question, you know. It wasn’t a question at all.” James smiles, kisses him, leaves his hand tangled in Michael’s hair, after.

“I’ll make you hot cocoa forever,” Michael manages at last, and James settles his head onto Michael’s shoulder, tugs the coziest blanket up over them both, and agrees, cheerfully, “Yes, of course you will, I know.”


End file.
